The advent of the fast food industry, airline meals, and unit dose packaging of medicines has created another industry devoted to the convenient packaging of ketchup, relish, mustard and other condiments as well as medicines and other liquid or semi-solid contents. These materials are dispensed in disposable, portion controlled containers formed from thermoplastic or thermoplastic coated materials which are heat sealed to form a container for the desired contents.
The difficulty with prior art disposable condiment containers lies in the fact that they are hard to open neatly. A disposable ketchup container, for example when torn open is apt to dispense its contents all at once, and control of the opening for dispensing the contents is random depending on the tear which the user makes. The present invention contemplates an easy opening, disposable condiment container which provides a controlled opening into the contents so that they may be evenly and neatly disbursed by forming the container with an opening means which may be controlled in size at the time of manufacture to suit the intended contents. The opening means disclosed may be employed for contents as thick as relish or as thin as cough medicine with equal success.
This easy opening feature of the present invention is achieved by making the container with an inside reverse fold at one corner and heat sealing the fold along the diagonal edge of the fold providing a four thickness layer of material at that edge and extending the reverse fold beyond the portion of the container use to hold the contents to provide an opening tab. When the opening tab is pulled the container is torn along the sealed diagonal of the inside reverse fold providing an opening having a predetermined diameter suitable for proper dispensing of the contents.